Right Wing Nut House

I am not a leveller. I am not a class warrior. I believe that the free market should set pay scales for everyone from janitors and secretaries to the CEO’s of large corporations. I believe the government has no business telling corporations how much to pay their CEO’s or top management. Nor should government be in the racket of giving an advantage to labor unions in negotiations by doing away with the secret ballot and forcing unions down the throat of unwilling business owners.

But what happens when the rich corrupt the market and make their own rules? What happens when powerful interests interfere with the workings of the market and make a mockery of fairness, accountability, and common sense? This is where the libertarian, laissez faire capitalism model falls on its keister and fails to do its job. When companies are so big that their movements can overwhelm the natural balance that the free market seeks to impose on all, some other entity must step in to restore that balance.

We conservatives have been loathe to see government interference in the free market of any kind, deeming such nosiness as anti-business and anti-capitalist. Indeed, many regulatory efforts by the government are counterproductive to competitiveness and inimicable to simple liberty. But there is also something to be said for a government that works to keep that balance offered by the free market by not allowing things to get too far out of whack.

The problem is that much government regulation is written by the very people it seeks to regulate. One of the dirty little secrets in Washington is that of the thousands and thousands of proposed regulations published in the Federal Register every year, very few are enacted without “input” from lobbyists representing the interests being affected. This input goes far beyond the comments requested when proposed regulations are published. In fact, the regulator and the regulatee often have an incestuous relationship where much of the language upon which a regulation is based - regulations that have the force of law - is inserted by well heeled industry lobbyists who are allowed into the process due to their expertise.

There is nothing inherently wrong in this. In fact, such a right is guaranteed in the First Amendment’s “right to redress grievances.” The problem is that many of these regulations are written to choke off competition, not protect or expand it.

But that’s only half the problem. Government has become complicit with these anti-competitive forces in Congress as well. The insertion into an innocuous piece of legislation of a tax rider that grants a specific corporation a break on some arcane IRS rule. Business cronies of members who are steered to the right people in the bureacracy who can throw a federal contract their way, thus making a mockery of the competitive bidding process.

The point is simple; when government (and I include government headed by Democrats as well as Republicans) puts itself on the side of the rich and powerful instead of on everyone’s side - rich, poor, business, labor, the middle class - the market becomes skewed and we end up with the kind of crisis and bailout mania that we have now. To those who say on both sides that the government must “choose” whose side to take, you are missing the point. If the government took the side of the market and generated regulations and legislation that increased competition, fairness, and accountability, we would not be in the situation we are today. All would benefit from that kind of government and prosperity for most would be the norm.

George Bush didn’t want that kind of government. Neither does Barack Obama who thinks he can skew things toward the poor and Middle Class rather than the perceived favoritism shown toward the rich and large corporations. The problem with Obama’s good intentions is that without massive reform in the bureaucracy and on Capitol Hill, the rich will simply go on making their own rules that either exempt themselves from market forces or make it harder for their competition to do business.

Is it a pipe dream to envision this kind of reform? Given the cynicism and venality we find in official Washington today, such reform is probably impossible. We have allowed corporations to grow beyond all reasonable bounds and it is impossible to reign them in given their international reach and massive influence on the government. Then there are the titans of finance like Maddoff who are so rich, they can make water flow uphill by getting regulators to look the other way while he steals tens of billions of dollars.

I am not complaining that Maddoff is rich. More power to him if he gambles successfully in the stock and commodities market. But his lawbreaking highlights the unfair advantage that accrues to the rich when they can bend government to their will and warp the competitive marketplace to their wn advantage.

These rather disjointed thoughts are largely the result of the $8 trillion in bailout money that has been handed to these corporations with little more than a hope and a prayer that they will use the funds in a responsible manner. The fact that most of the managers and CEO’s whose unconscionably reckless and - dare I say - greedy actions got us in this mess in the first place still have jobs at these companies does not give me confidence that anything will change. In fact, many of these top managers gave themselves large bonuses on top of their huge salaries.

In a true market economy, those guys would have trouble getting a job picking fruit. But today, they are rewarded for hastening the end of the free market in America and the arrival of the Plutocracy.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

I rise today in defense of my home state, my beloved Illinois, where top soil is so rich you can make soup from its deep, black loam and where agriculture was first elevated to a science to become the wonder of the civilized world.

We grow a lot of things in this state; corn, soy beans, hogs, cattle, dairy products, - all in numbers that are the envy of the rest of the world. Our higher education system is second to none in turning out both scholars and people who love to party. ( I would suggest you avoid Macomb, the home of Western Illinois University, on a Saturday night unless indulging in Bacchanalia is your thing.)

Besides that, Illinois features some truly remarkable points of interest. The two story outhouse in Gays, IL is a family favorite as is the captured leg of Santa Anna housed in the state capitol of Springfield. And who would want to miss visiting the largest Catsup bottle in the world located in the bustling tourist hub of Collinsville?

Why, my own little town of Streator has a statue of one of the angels of World War II, the Coffee Pot Lady. During the war, Streator saw about 1.2 million servicemen pass through town (we were a major hub for the old Sante Fe line) and faithfully doling out coffee and sandwiches as the trains stopped for fuel and water were dozens of women who made the long trip for the soldiers seem a little less impersonal and frightening.

I highlight all these natural and man made wonders located in Illinois because it seems that my home state is taking quite a beating in the national press and on blogs of late and I figured someone had to stand four square behind the natural beauty, the slow, deliberate pace of existence, and the emphasis placed on what is really important in life here in the Land of Lincoln; God, guns, and goofy politicians.

Indeed, it is sickening to have commentators who know nothing of Illinois or her people spouting off about the corruption in state and local government here. To all who are not from this state who have found the Blagojevich scandal a perfect opportunity to feel morally superior to us Illinoisans and write vicious, ignorant screeds about our “culture of corruption,” I say butt out!

Just what do you think you know about it, huh? And who do you think you are? If anybody is going to throw bricks at our politicians, it’s us. And we don’t need any help, thanks. We’ve been doing it for 190 years and by God we’ve got it down to a science and don’t need outsiders horning in on our fun. Our rope necktie parties are for locals only - no Cheeseheads or Hawkeyes allowed.

It cuts to me the quick that all these silly, snarky bloggers feel it necessary to disrespect the politicians in my state. Besides that, they are pikers when it comes to revealing the true nature of our political culture. Only native Illinoisans can come up with descriptions of our political heroes like “They are a carefully nurtured nest of nefarious nabobs who see politics as a cross between a slot machine and a gold mine.”

Out of staters don’t even come close and their attempts at describing what they can only dimly understand usually fall flat. For us Illinoisians, it is a matter of DNA; we are born with the ability to appreciate and become outraged over the rank dishonesty, the grasping, conniving, plotting, brazenly evil nature of our politics. It’s so much in our blood that I heard tell the Red Cross has considered keeping donations from Illinoisans in state so as not to infect such political paradises as Minnesota and Kansas. They also fear mixing blood from here with that of people from states like New Jersey or Louisiana. The monster that would create, once let loose upon the country, might doom us all.

Columnists, pundits, and TV talking heads can’t decide whether to opine as if auditioning for The Last Comic Standing by trying to outdo one another with unfunny jokes about the scandal or scream about political corruption being endemic to the way Illinois politicians do business. Endemic?  Tell that to a Chicago pol and he’s liable to give you a wary look, wondering why you think he needs a high colonic and perhaps contemplate how he can make a “pay to play” scheme go by getting a kickback from the enema bag manufacturer.

Besides, the idea of someone from New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, getting into a high dudgeon over corruption in politics is laughable. And that goes for just about anyone else anywhere in the US except maybe Montana where the ratio of guns to crooked pols is no accident. They take clean government very seriously in Big Sky Country. They also are not so politically correct as to have forgotten what good uses a little tar and some feathers can be put to.

For you New Yorkers, I might ask if Tamany Hall rings a bell - a city machine so corrupt that cockroaches were denied membership for being too clean. And all you Pennsylvanians who are on your high horse about Chicago political shenanigans, I direct your attention to your current governor, the Majority Leader of your Assembly, and how many other pols caught up in scandal just this year.

Alaskans have so much to be proud of what with their senior senator, his family, their lone congressman, and half the Republican party on the hook for taking favors from an oil company supplier. Let’s not forget New Jersey and its parade of criminal Newark mayors not to mention governors who resign in disgrace for showing favoritism to their boyfriends.

As for all you good government goofs in Minnesota, I’ve got just two words for you; Al Franken.

Reading a couple of articles about corruption in this state in Wikpedia is hardly the same as having grown up with it. To those of us native to Illinois who have spent our lives watching the comings and goings of governors, legislators, aldermen, lawyers, judges, businessmen, and Chicago city workers as they walk in and out of the jail in Pontiac, scandals like Blagobust are more than mere entertainment. They are reminders to all that “There but for the grace of God and a federal phone tap go I.”

So quit your yapping about stuff you really know little about. Whatever corruption scandals you’ve had in your own state cannot possibly prepare you to think, write, or spout about the Olympian nature of Illinois political stink. Our pols are greedier, more inventive in their criminality, more brazen in their disrespect of the law, and more breathtaking in their deeds of derring-do as they try to stay one step ahead of the prosecutor and two steps ahead of that former business partner they’ve cheated out of ill gotten gains.

Ed “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak, the infamous alderman and political thorn in the side of former Chicago Mayor, the late Harold Washington, was quoted as saying that he “talks to everyone as if they’re wearing a wire - even my wife.” Vrdolyak was the target of numerous investigations through the years but prosecutors could never catch him.

In his later years, after losing his clout, Eddie “retired” to private law practice and was considered a wise head in Chicago politics, nurturing many young up and comers, showing them the ropes until he was finally caught in a bribery-kickback scheme involving the sale of a medical school building to a Vrdolyak crony. Those charges may very well stick because Eddie forgot his own ironclad rule; his partner in crime wore a wire to several meetings where the illegal scheme was discussed.

The moral of the story is that not only could an Ed Vrdolyak only exist in Illinois but that only an Illinois pol could go down with such ironic juxtaposition attending his demise. That combination of Greek tragedy and Vaudeville comedy is why the rest of the country is so ill-equipped to comment on our troubles with politicians.

So I’d appreciate it if you just left us alone to wallow in our own muck, thank you.

David Axelrod is largely - and rightly - credited with successfully crafting Barack Obama’s campaign message machine and using it to great effect during the campaign.

But before he elected a president,  David Axelrod advised campaigns for a host of politicians including Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley. In fact, he considers himself an expert in “urban politics” - which translated means big city Democratic machine politics.

It is important to note that Republicans have their own “machines” - mostly in the south where “courthouse politics” employs many of the same patronage, kickback, and even “pay to play” schemes you routinely find in Democratic-run big cities. No party has a corner on corruption - which made the Democrat’s “outrage” in 2006 at the “Republican culture of corruption” so laughable.

But Axelrod just elected Mr. Clean as president. And it is important to get a handle on what a man who will be a close advisor to President Obama in the White House thinks of Patrick Fitzgerald’s corruption investigations.

Fitzy has taken down a host of pols in Chicago including aldermen, politically connected businessmen like Tony Rezko, and even 2 of Mayor Daley’s closest aides in city hall.

That last scandal involved serious violations of a court ruling that was supposed to clean up the city’s corrupt patronage system. Chicago mayors (and other big city pols) have used patronage as a means of controlling the Democratic party for decades. But a lawsuit against the practice in Chicago resulted in a ruling that most city jobs had to involve a fair hiring procedure where only the most qualified candidates would get government jobs.

Then in 2005, the Chicago Sun Times broke a fairly routine scandal involving the use of (or, in this case, the non-use) of city trucks - contracts to politically connected (and sometimes mobbed up) trucking firms that paid millions of dollars for little or no work. The city was entertained for weeks with stories of bribes being paid by city employees to steer truck contracts to specific firms, ghost payrolling, lolligagging truckers drawing taxpayer monies for going golfing, and other examples of extraordinary venality on the part of city politicians.

Once Fitzy got involved, the investigation expanded to include the entire patronage system in Chicago. And what prosecutors found was simply astonishing; 30 city pols who routinely violated the patronage law by doctoring documents to show interviews with candidates that never happened, resume tampering, and other fraudulent actions all to get loyal campaign workers city jobs. Fitzy’s investigation eventually reached deep into Daley’s office as two of his closest aides - including his patronage chief Robert Sorich - were convicted in the case.

Here’s how it worked:

In February 2005 a grand jury indicted Sorich for devising a scheme to “provide financial benefits, in the form of city jobs and promotions, in exchange for campaign work.” As part of this scheme, it charged, Sorich and other officials “corrupted the city’s personnel process” by awarding “jobs and promotions” to preselected candidates “through sham and rigged interviews.”

At the Sorich trial Kozicki, then in the buildings department, testified that as managing deputy commissioner he had altered 19-year-old Andrew Ryan’s interview rating to ensure that Ryan scored high enough to get a building inspector’s job for which other applicants were more qualified. Andrew Ryan is the son of Tom Ryan, secretary-treasurer of Carpenters Local 13, a union that was a major financial contributor to Daley’s 2003 reelection campaign.

And Axelrod? Here’s what the new Senior Advisor to the President had to say about it: back in 2006:

As Axelrod has said, a too-zealous prosecutor can look at normal political behavior and suspect impropriety. In a 2006 Vanity Fair interview, the Obama aide complained about Fitzgerald’s scrutiny of Chicago politics.

“He goes after fleas and elephants with the same bazooka,” Axelrod said. “At some point there’s a line … where you begin criminalizing politics in its most innocent form.”

When you practice the art of politics amidst such sleaze and corruption, egregious lawbreaking can, I suppose, seem “innocent.” But what does that reveal about the moral compass of people like Axelrod? When the rest of us are shocked and appalled at the routine and arrogant criminal conduct carried out by powerful people like Daley and Blagojevich, who obviously believe the rules followed by ordinary folk do not apply to them, do we really want moral pygmies like Axelrod anywhere near the seat of national government?

Indeed, Obama himself - now caught in the lie that he had no knowledge that any of his aides were meeting with Blagojevich’s people about his senate seat - has shown a curious lethargy about the entire Blagojevich scandal, especially because he’s known since a week after the election that Blago was shopping his seat to the highest bidder (See Jim Lindgren’s timeline of the scandal that shows how Obama first, made it known he wanted his good friend Valerie Jarrett to get the appointment and within 24 hrs of a phonecon involving Blago and one of his advisors - probably Emanuel - he yanked her name from consideration and gave her a job in the White House.)

The Obama team will vigorously deny they knew anything about Blago’s attempts to sell his senate seat but that just doesn’t pass the smell test. Given how careless Blagojevich was about the spread of such information, it is inconcievable that the president-elect, whose Chicago and Springfield connections are as good as anyone’s, wouldn’t have been aware of what was going on.

But why should they not come forward with the truth? They didn’t break any laws. The reason they won’t and can’t reveal their knowledge in this matter is because to do so would be to reveal a hole in their moral universe that shows that they considered Blago’s auction of the senate seat “innocent” and nothing more than routine political horse trading - routine for the culture of corruption in Chicago and Springfield. Obama was smart enough to see a train wreck coming and pulled his good friend Jarrett from consideration while still allowing Emanuel to have input into the selection process. In short, there were no illegalities but rather an incredible ineptitude in recognizing a moral problem with Blago’s criminality.

I am not sure what this portends for the next 4 years as far as the way the White House will operate. If you have a bunch of people who don’t know or can’t tell what’s moral or immoral as far as political actions are concerned, what kind of scandals will be breaking by this time next year?

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

Those of us who have followed Illinois politics for any length of time are tempted to give the Rod Blagojevich arrest and pending indictment a quick shrug, a knowing smile, and a cynical sigh of know-it-all arrogance. “We’ve seen this before in Illinois, nothing new here, just move along” is the condenscending response to questions from out of staters that usually suffice when some Illinois politico is caught with his fingers in the taxpayer’s cookie jar.

But the Blagojevich True Crime Drama is not criminality as usual in Illinois politics. The malfeasance of Governor Rod Blagojevich is so outrageous, so brazen, so breathtaking in its scope and character that even  jaded journalistic hacks whose beat has been the statehouse for years are shocked. In the long history of official Illinois corruption, the Blagojevich schemes to personally enrich himself, enrich his cronies, and use the power of his office to further his nefarious designs are unprecedented.

“I want to make money” the governor was heard admitting on tape. Evidently, the opportunities that presented themselves for Blagojevich to clean up were too tempting to pass up. Here’s a partial list of the charges via the Chicago Tribune:

Prosecutors alleged Blagojevich sought appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, secretary of the Energy Department or gain an ambassadorship in the new Obama administration, or get a lucrative job with a union in exchange for appointing a union-preferred candidate. An Obama spokesman had no immediate comment.

Blagojevich also was alleged to be using a favors list, made up largely of individuals and firms that have state contracts or received taxpayer benefits, from which to conduct a $2.5 million fundraising drive before year’s end when a new tougher law on campaign donations, prompted by the governor’s voracious fundraising, would take effect.

Even Blagojevich’s recently announced $1.8 billion plan for new interchanges and “green lanes” on the Illinois Tollway was subject to corruption, prosecutors alleged. The criminal complaint alleges Blagojevich expected an unnamed highway concrete contractor to raise a half-million dollars for his campaign fund in exchange for state money for the tollway project. “If they don’t perform, (expletive) ‘em,” Blagojevich said, according to the complaint.

Blagojevich and Harris also allegedly conspired to demand the firing of Chicago Tribune editorial board members responsible for editorials critical of Blagojevich in exchange for state help with the sale of Wrigley Field, the Chicago Cubs baseball stadium owned by Tribune Co.

In addition, federal prosecutors alleged Blagojevich and Harris, along with others, obtained and sought to gain financial benefits for the governor, members of his family and his campaign fund in exchange for appointments to state boards and commissions, state jobs and state contracts.

The big news, of course, is the governor’s attempt to sell the senate seat of Barack Obama. Incredibly, it appears that he tried to get the best deal by shopping the seat to as many as 7 potential candidates - including, indirectly, Barack Obama.

Blogger Joseph Cannon of Cannonfire details the offer to an unamed high level Obama advisor (evidence suggests it is newly-designated chief of staff Rahm Emanuel). Blagojevich was pushing what Cannon calls “a wacky scheme” where the governor would take over control of a not for profit group - a 501(c)(4) - set up by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates (who would act at the behest of Obama) in exchange for appointing Obama’s choice for the senate seat - his long time friend and advisor Valerie Jarrett.

This is directly from the criminal complaint: (PDF) that details several conversations caught on a federal wiretap:

The advisor asked ROD BLAGOJEVICH if the 501(c)(4) is a real effort or just a vehicle to help ROD BLAGOJEVICH. ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that it is a real effort but also a place for ROD BLAGOJEVICH to go when he is no longer Governor. The advisor said he likes the Change to Win idea better, and notes that it is more likely to happen because it is one step removed from the President-elect.

“Change to Win” is a labor NGO that the governor was interested in heading up. In order to get that job, Blagojevich had to approach the head of the powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Andy Stern. The governor was willing to name a candidate who would be little more than a union toady in order to secure that position. And he was asking “Advisor B” (Emanuel) to make it happen.

according to Advisor B from the President-elect’s perspective, there would be fewer “fingerprints” on the President-elect’s involvement with Change to Win because Change to Win already has an existing stream of revenue and, therefore, “you won’t have stories in four years that they bought you off.”

Was Rahm Emanuel (read Cannon’s reasoning on why the evidence points to the chief of staff) making a counter offer to the governor’s bribe? It’s an interesting question and one that the press may wish to ask the new chief of staff.

In addition to the Obama team, Blagojevich was trying to sell the senate seat to as many as 6 different candidates. One candidate’s representative - “Candidate #5 in the complaint - allegedly offered Blagojevich a substantial bribe for the office. The governor liked that idea and told an aide that if Obama “didn’t give him anything” he would choose Candidate #5.

Who is “Candidate #5?” Speculation is zeroing in on Jesse Jackson, Jr. From the actual complaint via Marc Ambinder:

Blagojevich said that he might be able to cut a deal with Senate Candidate 5 that provided
Blagojevich with something “tangible up front.” Noting that he was going to meet with Senate
Candidate 5 in the next few days, Blagojevich told Fundraiser A to reach out to an intermediary (Individual D), from whom Blagojevich is attempting to obtain campaign contributions and whi Blagojevich believes is close to Senate Candidate 5. Blagojevich told Fundraiser A to tell Individual D that Senate Candidate 5 was a very realistic candidate but Blagojevich was getting a lot of pressure not to appoint Senate Candidate 5, according to the affidavit.

The only candidate for the senate seat to meet with Obama in the time period mentioned was Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr.

It should be noted that there is absolutely no evidence that Jackson had any knowledge of these representations to Obama made on his behalf by a fundraiser nor is there any evidence that an “intermediary” informed him of the “negotiations.

If you read all 72 pages of the indictment, you just can’t help being struck by the money grubbing nature of the governor and his mania for money. He had schemes within schemes to extract cash from supporters, cronies, and companies who wished to do business with the state.

His “pay to play” program was particularly lucrative. This was a scheme where Blagojevich friend and campaign financier Antoin “Tony” Rezko pressured companies doing business with the state to contribute to the Blagojevich re-election campaign in exchange for lucrative state contracts. Rezko was convicted of 18 counts of fraud in connection with the scheme and the governor’s name was prominently mentioned during his trial. Others involved in this scheme include Stuart Levine, a GOP mover and shaker in the state.

At least you can say we here in Illinois are bi-partisan when it comes to corruption.

While the selling of the senate seat and pay to play complaints got the most headlines, perhaps the most incredible of all the charges alleged against Blagojevich is his attempted shakedown of the Chicago Tribune.

The Trib not only owns the Chicago Tribune but also the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Owner Sam Zell (who has just filed for bankruptcy) is trying to sell the team and, more importantly, one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Chicago; Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs.

But the sale of Wrigley field will involve massive taxes - something on the order of $100 million dollars in capital gains. Zell had a approached the Illinois Finance Authority (IFA) in order to strike a deal where, according to the criminal complaint, the IFA would take title to Wrigley Field thus saving Zell a lot of cash.

Enter Blagojevich who told his chief of staff John Harris (also arrested today) to make it clear to Zell that no help from the IFA would be forthcoming unless some members of the Chicago Tribune editorial board were fired.

In a November 4 phone call with Harris, Blagojevich told his aide “”our recommendation is fire all those [expletive] people, get ‘em the [expletive] out of there and get us some editorial support.”

Harris reported back on November 11 that Zell “got the message and is very sensitive to the issue.” Later, Harris told Blagojevich that there were “certain corporate reorganizations and budget cuts coming and, reading between the lines, he’s (Zell) going after that section.”

No firings have taken place yet and it is doubtful that Zell will make a move now that this deal is in the open. I suppose he saw it as a cost of doing business and $100 million is a lot of cash. But the thought that he would buckle to the whims of this strutting peacock of a politician who wanted journalists who were only doing the job they were being paid to do axed because they were telling the truth about his corruption stinks of rank cowardice.

No doubt over the next few days many aspects of this story will be fleshed out. We will almost certainly be treated to some fancy footwork by the Obama team as they seek to avoid the appearance that anyone connected with the new president came within a country mile of Blagojevich. That may be difficult to do what with the taped conversation between the governor and “Advisor B” and unanswered questions about whether Obama actually discussed the appointment of a new senator with the governor or not.

Obama said in his statement he had no contact with Blagojevich. Unfortunately for the new president, his top aide David Axelrod told Fox News on November 23 that Obama had indeed talked with Blagojevich about the senate seat. The transition has since released a statement saying that Axelrod “misspoke” on November 23.

And I have a bridge over the Chicago River you can have for a song if you believe that one.

The chances are very good that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is far from finished. Meanwhile, the Democratic party in Illinois may be in for a very rough ride as their leader ponders his future - or lack of one - and his associates lawyer up in anticipation of legal trouble.

My latest at PJ Media is about the Blagojevich arrest and details “the most breathtaking corruption in the history of Illinois politics.”

A sample:

In any other state, this would be simply unbelievable, or perhaps considered a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence to have such breathtaking and brazen corruption reveal itself at the highest levels of state government.

The “pay-to-play” charges have been out in the public for more than two years. This was a scheme where Blagojevich friend and campaign financier Antoin “Tony” Rezko pressured companies doing business with the state to contribute to the Blagojevich re-election campaign in exchange for lucrative state contracts. Rezko was convicted of 18 counts of fraud in connection with the scheme and the governor’s name was prominently mentioned during his trial.

This probably will not involve Barack Obama. The next president gave Blago a wide berth and evidently went so far as to pull Valerie Jarrett, his close personal friend, out of the running for his replacement when it became clear that Blagojevich was trying to sell the seat to the highest bidder.

But it is instructive to note that this is the political culture that nurtured and raised Barack Obama. To think that it hasn’t tainted him is just plain idiocy. There are plenty of examples of Obama using his clout to help a friend or crony not to mention steer government business to campaign contributors. Obama lived, breathed, ate, and slept Illinois politics for more than a decade. And that’s something to keep in mind as his Administration rolls along.

I don’t know whether Dick Cheney or Albert Gonzalez are really in trouble as a result of an indictment handed down by a Willacy County grand jury in Texas. But if I were a ham sandwich, I would definitely take it on the lam:

A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on state charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County’s federal detention centers.

The indictment, which had not yet been signed by the presiding judge, was one of seven released Tuesday in a county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles in recent years. Another of the indictments named a state senator on charges of profiting from his position.

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra’s tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.

Cheney’s indictment on a charge of engaging in an organized criminal activity criticizes the vice president’s investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and “at least misdemeanor assaults” on detainees because of his link to the prison companies.

Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on Tuesday, saying that the vice president had not yet received a copy of the indictment.

The indictment accuses Gonzales of using his position while in office to stop an investigation in 2006 into abuses at one of the privately-run prisons.

Of course, lefties are short stroking their way to ecstasy. Our friends at Firedoglake:

Gonzales and Cheney have been indicted by a grand jury. The indictment is related to prisoner abuse at Wallace County Federal detention centers, which are run by Vanguard Group. Cheney has an investment in Vanguard and is charged with conflict of interest and “misdemeanor assault” on detainees through the company, while Gonzales is charged with using his office to quash an investigation. (h/t Perris)

Get out the popcorn, this could be interesting.

And maybe it will shine a light on the privatization of the prison system in the US, which has led to even greater abuses of prisoners than before.

The “Gun Toting Liberal” takes aim at…himself:

If you bothered to click on the aforementioned AP article, you’d have learned the South Texas jurorists indicted The Vampire the vice president on CRIMINAL charges stemming from making money through some sort of a hedgefund designed to abuse and torture federal prisoners and his pal “Gonzo” for — what else? — OBSTRUCTING federal investigations into The Veep’s [again... "alleged"] high crimes and misdemeanors. Gotta give ‘em both credit, because, again — COUNT of our Lame Duck President Bush to bail his fellow criminals out of any sort of a legal mess this whole fiasco might lead to — in other words, the only CHANCE we might have to see this trio behind bars is via International law and many, MANY of my fellow Americans share my point of view that justice just MIGHT be served the day they are sentenced for and held accountable by, The Hague for their [Pssst -- again -- "alleged"] war crimes. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen too many “pardons” going on over there lately; correct me if I’m wrong, which I, of course, frequently AM.

So just who is this brave, intrepid prosecutor who dares to do what the mealy-mouthed, weak-kneed, chicken-sh*t Democrats in Congress have failed to do all these years

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra’s tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.

[snip]

After Guerra’s office was raided as part of the investigation early last year, he camped outside the courthouse in a borrowed camper with a horse, three goats and a rooster. He threatened to dismiss hundreds of cases because he believed local law enforcement had aided the investigation against him.

On Tuesday, Guerra said the indictments speak for themselves. He said the prison-related charges are a national issue and experts from across the country testified to the grand jury. Asked about the indictments against local players in the justice system who had pursued him, Guerra said, “the grand jury is the one that made those decisions, not me.”

It is not your average prosecutor who would camp out in front of the courthouse with a horse. And if he is an extremely horny fellow, I see the reason for the 3 goats. But it takes a certified, first class, loony tunes, nutcase to subject a rooster to this kind of abuse. Was he using the fowl as an alarm clock? Maybe it was part of some secret religious rite where eventually, he would have bitten the rooster’s head off a la Alice Cooper. More likey, he enjoyed stimulating conversations with the bird about the law and how he would get back at his “enemies.”

There has been no word on the fate of the ham sandwich but I’m betting it’s already disappeared. Evidently, Guerra was contemplating indicting a bologna sandwich as well — for impersonating food — but in the end, the grand jury balked and then broke for lunch. Guerra thought it suspicious that several of the jurors appeared to be eating bagged lunches with both ham and bologna sandwiches but before he could make his move, the evidence disappeared.

This isn’t the first “ham sandwich” indictment in the history of US jurisprudence and it won’t be the last. Perhaps the most famous Deli indictment was the Jim Garrison travesty that saw a perfectly innocent man - who happened to be a homosexual - indicted for the Kennedy assassination.

Clay Shaw got caught up in a Jim Garrison’s desire to be governor of Louisiana while also being the victim of the prosecutor’s pathological hatred of homosexuals. The Oliver Stone film JFK depicting this man as a hero may be the most cockeyed, dishonest, twisted, and disgusting view of history ever put on film. It’s as if Springtime for Hitler was actually made as a serious look a Nazi Germany.

Garrison has been thoroughly, completely, and deservedly discredited by so many reputable historical and journalistic sources that one must studiously and deliberately ignore the facts in order to give him even the benefit of the doubt for making an honest mistake. Garrison based his indictment on a “tip” from an alcoholic private investigator named Jack Martin who confessed to the FBI within a week of the assassination that he concocted the whole story while he was drunk.

In truth, the “story” Garrison tried to sell kept changing as his “investigation” unfolded. What was clear was his sick animus directed against gay men. He had actually made a name for himself “cleaning up” prostitution in the French Quarter a few years earlier. What is rarely mentioned when portraying Garrison as a courageous battler for justice is that almost all of the arrests in that effort were of gay men - many who were not prostitutes but simply cruising.

His first “theory” of the JFK plot was that it was a “homosexual thrill killing.” Only later, when that theory fell apart because one of the main “plotters,” a homosexual named David Ferrie, died of cancer (that Garrison said was actually given to him by the CIA) did he charge “the military industrial complex” with the crime.

Writing in the Saturday Evening Post, James Phelan relates a wacky, surreal conversation he had with Garrison about the plot:

In an effort to get Garrison’s story into focus, I asked him the motive of the Kennedy conspirators. He told me that the murder at Dallas had been a homosexual plot.
“They had the same motive as Loeb and Leopold, when they murdered Bobbie Franks in Chicago back in the twenties,” Garrison said. “It was a homosexual thrill-killing, plus the excitement of getting away with a perfect crime. John Kennedy was everything that Dave Ferrie was not — a successful, handsome, popular, wealthy, virile man. You can just picture the charge Ferrie got out of plotting his death.”

I asked how he had learned that the murder was a homosexual plot.

“Look at the people involved,” Garrison said. “Dave Ferrie, homosexual. Clay Shaw, homosexual. Jack Ruby, homosexual.”

“Ruby was a homosexual?”

“Sure, we dug that out,” Garrison said. “His homosexual nickname was Pinkie. That’s three. Then there was Lee Harvey Oswald.”

But Oswald was married and had two children, I pointed out.

“A switch-hitter who couldn’t satisfy his wife,” Garrison said. “That’s all in the Warren Report.” He named two more “key figures” whom he labeled homosexual.

“That’s six homosexuals in the plot,” Garrison said. “One or maybe two, okay. But all six homosexual? How far can you stretch the arm of coincidence?”

And then there was Garrison’s Section 8 discharge from the army:

In 1952, Jim Garrison was relieved of duty in the National Guard. Doctors at the Brooke Army Hospital in Texas diagnosed him as suffering from a “severe and disabling psychoneurosis” which “interfered with his social and professional adjustment to a marked degree.” The evaluation further said that Garrison “is considered totally incapacitated from the standpoint of military duty and moderately incapacitated in civilian adaptability,” and recommended long-term psychotherapy.

Garrison has been quoted as saying that the information was placed in his file by the government in order to discredit him.

And this is the man that Oliver Stone made a hero of in JFK? Clay Shaw’s life was ruined - being outed as a homosexual at that time was the kiss of death. He died a broken man a few years after his quick (45 minute) acquittal by the jury. Perhaps Garrison’s abuse of power was best summed up by former New Orleans District Attorney during the 1990’s Harry Connick (father of musician/actor Harry Connick, Jr.) who tells investigator Gerald Posner (Case Closed) what he told Oliver Stone when the film maker asked his opinion of the Shaw Trial:

“I said I thought it was one of the grossest, most extreme miscarriages of justice in the annals of American judicial history. And Stone said, ‘Well, we are going to do the movie anyway,’ as if I was suggesting he shouldn’t do it. I said: ‘Well, do whatever you want to do. I have nothing to say about that. You were asking and I was telling you that it was just a miscarriage of justice. An innocent man was plucked out of somebody’s mind and made a defendant in a criminal case.’ “

Both Garrison and Guerra have proven the adage that, if he tries hard enough, a prosecutor can get a ham sandwich indicted. But a ham sandwich doesn’t have a reputation nor does the deli specialty have a family, friends, and loved ones who are affected by the crazies who sometimes end up dispensing justice in our system. Such men — including the Duke rape case prosecutor Mike Nifong — deserve as much disapprobation as can be heaped upon their heads as they are ushered off the stage into an infamous retirement.

The answer is, yes - I prefer to go down in flames, hitching a ride with the Valkyries to Valhalla rather than cheerleading for a man who would choose a woman as his running mate with such a wretched moral sense.

I have, with few exceptions, tempered my criticism of John McCain’s proposed policies during this latter part of the campaign, concentrating instead on the horse race because frankly, there are many conservatives more qualified than I and more familiar with the issues who are doing a much better job than I could in making the conservative case for McCain despite his more problematic stands on issues.

I have also, for the most part, given a pass to McCain on the question of judgment, although I think the post mortems on McCain’s campaign will reveal some monumental blunders on the economic crisis as well as their electoral strategy (where they expended limited resources).

On the question of the Palin pick, however, I have had no such qualms in supporting McCain. Marc Ambinder (no fan of Palin) explains why the Alaska governor was really the only pick McCain could make:

A Sunday morning quarterback still makes a persuasive argument for picking Palin. In this environment, the Republican candidate could only win if he consolidates his base and wins a majority of persuadable votes; the Democrat simply has to turn out Democrats. Though McCain at one point wanted to pick Joe Lieberman, he’d have cut a leg from the stool and replaced it with one that, aside from his party affiliation — independent Democrat — has no real appeal among independents anymore. One step backward and no steps forward. By the time the news began to leak out that McCain wanted Lieberman, the trail balloon was also leaky. Republican delegations made it clear that they’d walk out on McCain. We still don’t know why McCain decided that the risk wasn’t worth taking — that’s for another Draper piece — but we know that he suddenly shifted back to someone who had impressed him early on, someone who, at the time, could check the two boxes: excite Republicans and convert independents and persuadables.

Whether the vetting was complete or rushed, whether Palin and her advisers were completely forthcoming about her record…. again, wait for the Draper piece. The point here is that the choice was defensible. That almost every piece of information that has come out subsequent to the pick has hurt Palin can be interpreted in several ways: either the media was preordained to crush her spirit from the beginning, or the McCain campaign didn’t know about them, or they’ve been distorted beyond any sense of the rational.

I would add that Palin defenders have hit the nail on the head when they make the case for distortion, bias, double standards, and outright lies and rumors being printed by the MSM. The case of Palin’s belief in creationism is a perfect example. The rumor started on a site written by a Palin hater in Alaska that she believed people walked the earth with dinosaurs and that she wished to teach creationism “alongside” evolution in Alaskan schools. The rumor was printed verbatim and passed off as truth in the Los Angeles Times among other outlets.

Palin never said any such thing nor does she believe that creationism has a place in a public school curriculum. It was a lie made up out of whole cloth, swallowed by the press, and given wide distribution by liberal blogs who never bothered to check the provenance of the story. Pattericio points out that the Times never retracted one bit of the story.

Ambinder makes the same case I’ve been making since Palin was chosen; that McCain basically had no choice but to pick her. (For your Romneyites I only have one word: Mormon).

But this doesn’t negate certain facts. Palin is unready to hold high office and won’t be, in my opinion, for perhaps a year. The public isn’t buying the counter argument and her negatives are so high now she has become a huge drag on the campaign with two groups that McCain absolutely must win over if he is to win; white women and independents. Palin may have solidified the base but you don’t win too many elections getting 30% of the vote.

No doubt a large part of the problem has been the unfair treatment she has received in the media. But you can’t just explain away the voter’s unhappiness with Palin by ascribing all her negatives to media bias and manipulation. The American people are a little smarter than that.

Perhaps they sense something about her that Palin worshipers fail to see. It certainly doesn’t help Palin’s case when she makes a statement like this:

Brian Williams: Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist under this definition?

Sarah Palin: [Sighs] There’s no question Bill Ayres, under his own admittance, was, um, one who sought to destroy, er, our US Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist. There’s no question there. Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities, that, uh, er, that would be unacceptable. Uh, I don’t know if you’re going to use the word “terrorist” there, but it’s unacceptable and, uh, um, it, er, would not be condoned, of course, on, on our watch, but [sigh] I don’t know what you’re asking is if I regret referring to Bill Ayres as an unrepentant domestic terrorist. I don’t regret characterizing him as that.

Brian Williams: I’m just asking what other categories you would put in there. Abortion clinic bombers, protesters in cities where fires were started, molotov cocktails were thrown, people died.

Sarah Palin: I would put in that category of Bill Ayres anyone else who would seek to campaign to destroy our United States Capitol and our Pentagon and would seek to destroy innocent Americans.

There is no mistaking her answer. I sought out a fuller transcript in order to ascertain her exact words as well as her full response and any follow up question asked by Williams.

Sarah Palin is refusing to call people who would bomb abortion clinics terrorists. Yes, she condemns their actions. But she is parsing the definition of terrorism so as not to offend that small, but vocal part of the conservative base who may not see clinic bombers as heroes, but refuse to place their actions in a a moral context that equates the tactics of the jihadis with the Eric Rudolphs of the world.

This is moral cowardice. The purpose of bombing abortion clinics (it hasn’t happened in a decade) is exactly the same as fanatics who set off car bombs in crowded markets; that is, to intimidate and to terrorize people.

Have Muslim fanatics set off more bombs than Christians? Of course they have. But if you are going to base a moral judgment on numbers of dead, then you are probably able to parse the moral guilt of Hitler compared to Stalin - or perhaps Hitler compared to Idi Amin. The death of innocents perpetrated for political ends, be it fewer abortions due to the terrorizing of women and fewer abortion clinics due to their destruction, or the blowing up of a marketplace to intimidate and frighten people into abandoning support for their government is terrorism. It is always terrorism. It was terrorism yesterday, it is terrorism today, and it will be terrorism tomorrow. And anyone who can’t make the moral judgment that this is so is, in my opinion, a coward - especially since if Palin had admitted that bombing abortion clinics was terrorism, she would have angered a small but significant part of the conservative base.

Don’t believe me? Here are some observations by those moral titans in the anti-abortion crowd about whether bombing clinics is terrorism:

“No, you pro-abortion baby killing fanatics are the terrorists. What is a terrorist? Someone who murders innocent people. That is YOU. You pro-abortion babykillers murder innocent children each and every day.” — Rev Donald Soitz.

“We have shed the blood of the innocent in the womb, and we are now reaping it in the streets.” — Rev. Flip Benham, Operation Rescue

Ever since then, whenever someone brings up a terrorist attack carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, you are expected to practice the Fairness Doctrine and give appropriate lip service to the “Christian” attacks on abortion clinics in order to demonstrate that neither side is beyond reproach. Of course, there is something to be said about the fact that when “Christians” attack, they are not supported by a body of religious figures that can be recognized as a legitimate authority, are wholly condemned by the Christian community both far and wide, and are doing so not for religious reasons but because in their minds these abortion clinics are clinics of death where babies are daily being killed and thus their existence means the continued death of another child. Somehow it’s hard to generate the same feelings against someone who wants to preserve life as it is to generate against someone who uses planes as torpedoes. But I digress.

Perhaps the most telling thing about how absurd this argument is are the simple numbers. A simple glance indicates that, across America, there have only been 168 attacks against abortion clinics since 1982, the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) Bureau reports. These attacks come with surprisingly little casualties, and most attacks are rather measured in property damage, rather than human lives lost. Therefore to run it on average, every year there will be six or seven abortion related attacks across America, with a marginal increase in these numbers in Canada and Australia (one in Australia’s history, for example).

Moral equivalency between jihadis and Christians is not, cannot be based on comparative body counts but only on the intent of the attacker - the only possible moral context you can place any attack on innocents. Palin’s parsing is an ignominious example of a politician who would rather pander to the extreme of her base instead of taking a clear, unambiguous moral stand against political violence. She should be condemned for this by those on the right who claim moral ascendancy over the rest of us due to their religious beliefs as well as any thinking conservative who cares about the moral standing of our candidates.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, A huge truck bomb detonated outside of the building housing our Marines located near the Beirut Airport and leveled the structure killing 241 American servicemen.

In a sobering column in today’s Wall Street Journal, Robert F. Turner draws a straight, undeviating line from that bombing to the attacks on 9/11 and shows how Osama Bin Laden took the measure of America and found it wanting while Congress seized powers previously reserved to the executive and emasculated our intelligence apparatus:

During a 1998 interview with an ABC News reporter in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden declared that this withdrawal proved Americans can’t accept casualties. It was obviously a consideration in his decision to order the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the conventional wisdom, that those deadly attacks resulted from “an intelligence failure,” doesn’t tell the full story.

A major reason we failed to detect the 9/11 attacks in advance was because, beginning in the 1970s, Congress launched a major public attack on the intelligence community. Mr. Biden, for example, was one of 17 senators to vote on Oct. 2, 1974, to make all covert operations (even espionage in some cases) unlawful. In 1986, he bragged in a New Republic interview that he’d personally blocked planned covert operations during the Reagan administration simply by threatening to leak them. (That statement calls to mind John Jay’s observation, in Federalist No. 64, that because Congress could not be trusted to keep secrets, the Constitution left the president “able to manage the business of intelligence as prudence might suggest.”)

In 1978, Congress continued its intrusion into presidential powers by enacting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), making it a felony for intelligence professionals to monitor communications between foreign terrorists abroad and individuals within the U.S. without first getting a special warrant. But in a unanimous opinion, the appellate court established by FISA observed that every court to decide the issue had held the president has “inherent authority” under the Constitution “to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information,” adding: “We take for granted that the President does have that authority . . .”

Congress failed to anticipate in FISA the dangers posed by a terrorist like Zacarias Moussaoui — which is why FBI agents were unable to examine the contents of Moussaoui’s laptop computer and perhaps prevent the 9/11 attacks. Michael Hayden, then Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), later expressed his “professional judgment” that had these legal constraints (FISA) not existed “we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States” prior to the attacks, and “we would have identified them as such.”

It is hard to overestimate the damage done by liberal Congressional Democrats over the last 30 years to our intelligence capabilities. They not only put up walls between our foreign and domestic spy agencies but also created a mindset that deliberately destroyed our “Humint” or human intelligence capability. Carter’s DCIA Stansfield Turner fired 800 covert agents and turned our intelligence efforts toward satellites and other electronic methods of intelligence gathering - a move that is costing us dearly to this day.

Turner’s “Halloween Massacre” prevented us from employing enough assets in the old Soviet Union during a crucial period of the cold war. Beyond that, our inability to infiltrate al-Qaeda and other radical Muslim groups no doubt contributed to our ignorance about Osama Bin Laden’s motives and plans - a direct cause of the 9/11 tragedy. People like Michael Scheurer who managed the Bin Laden desk at the CIA during the 90’s, has commented that our inability to get into the mind of the terrorist - only possible using Humint sources - was a huge obstacle to successfully dealing with him.

Then when ex-CIA agent Philip Agee outed several European CIA chiefs of station, the left made him a hero - which is strange when you consider the crocodile tears the left shed over the “outing” of Valerie Plame. When liberals became so concerned about keeping the names of our CIA personnel secret, they never revealed. Lionizing Agee who, some believe, got the Athens station chief murdered following the publication of his name, has been disappeared from the Plame narrative. In fact, the entire previous 35 years of liberal objections, liberal interference, liberal bashing, liberal paranoia, and liberal hate of the CIA has been flushed down the memory hole - all just so that they could weep about poor little Valerie Plame and her machinations to undercut the policy of the elected president of the United States.

Such inconsistencies and hypocrisy would get in the way of  liberals appearing to be concerned about national security - at least at election time.

The leaks coming from liberals ensconced in the CIA and DIA over the last 8 years have been damaging and astonishingly partisan. This is a consequence of liberals in Congress doing the same thing with impunity. If they don’t like something the intel people are doing, they run to the press. If they discover a secret that, if outed, could be politically useful to them, they blab it.

They have emasculated, politicized, railroaded, terrorized, and caused confusion and dispiritedness in our intelligence community for more than 30 years. Some of our best and brightest analysts and agents retire early rather than deal with the constant leaking that makes their jobs next to impossible to perform.

The patriots who serve without public recognition in our intelligence agencies deserve better.

Much of this blog post originally appears in The American Thinker 

It’s been a devastating 24 hours for the man the world has come to know as “Joe, the Plumber.” Just yesterday morning, he was the toast of the political world, appearing on Good Morning America and being interviewed by Katy (don’t call me a journalist) Couric. He appears in a new John McCain ad, conservatives have embraced him as an entrepreneurial icon, and the apparel industry is going nuts with every manner of Joe the Plumber T-Shirts (For just $35.95 plus shipping, you can own this “Joe the Plumber is my Homeboy “T” in black, navy blue, or ten other colors.)

But this was before the minions of our political savior decided that Joe the Plumber must die.

Well, not literally, I suppose. Rather, they set out to kill his name - a careful, deliberate, gleeful campaign to assassinate, smear, and destroy his name in order to lay the icon low. The problem is that this icon is just an ordinary American citizen whose own mother would now probably disown him after the left and the national press have unearthed a frightening amount of information - some of it not very flattering - about his life.

A tax lien, a question of whether he is working legally (there is a a debate whether he actually needs a license to perform residential work), a divorce - it is enormously disconcerting to see the kind of information you can dig up on someone if you know your way around a search engine or two.

And the dumpster diving press must have temporarily re-assigned the smelly, stinking reporters who have been rummaging in Sarah Palin’s trash in Alaska the last 6 weeks. They probably welcome the change in scenery although I imagine the stench in which they are now wallowing in Holland, Ohio smells pretty much the same. From the looks of what they’ve been able to dig up, they sure seem to know their way around a sh*t hole.

For those in the upper echelons of the garbage sniffing media, it is important to get the smear out - even if you are unsure whether the crap you are dealing out is actually, like, you know, true and stuff.

Example: Huffpo:

You see, Joe Wurzelbacher is apparently related to Robert Wurzelbacher. Who is the son-in-law of (are you ready…?) Charles Keating!

Yes, that Charles Keating. The Charles Keating of the Keating 5 Scandal. For which John McCain was reprimanded by the United States Senate, for his involvement in attempting to illegally influence government regulators. The Charles Keating who John McCain has been trying to avoid have mentioned. So, he basically mentioned it 24 times.

[snip]

Mind you, I thought it odd when John McCain first brought up Joe Wurzelbacher’s but then never referred to his last name again. I thought perhaps he’d forgotten it. Or it was too hard to pronounce. Apparently though there was a better reason for him to quit saying the name “Wurzelbacher” 24 times. If only Sen. McCain (R-AZ) had remembered the pesky Tivo, where you can rewind.

Now, in fairness, John McCain might not have known than Joe Wurzelbacher was from that same Wurzelbacher family. He might have thought it was just some regular Wurzelbacher. And who knows, maybe they’re not even related?

Get that? All of this smear by association, all of this information about Joe splashed all over the pages of the #1 liberal website in America, and then “Who knows, maybe they’re not even related…”

Pardon me for my stupidity (which many on the right and left have been noticing lately) but shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t you like, sorta first, ascertain the truth and THEN print the smear?

Just asking…

At any rate, there has been a lot of pixelated poison being dished out by our good friends on the left. Some of it is even true, although the relevance of anything relating to Joe the Plumber’s personal and professional life escapes me. Last time I looked, all Joe did was ask Obama a question. And no matter what they dig up about poor Joe (they have only scratched the surface of his sex life - I assume that stuff will be out before long), it doesn’t change what Obama said about “spreading the wealth” one iota.

They can smear Joe from now until the 2012 election but it doesn’t change the underlying reason that they need to smear him: Obama revealed just a little bit too much of his real philosophy.

For more than a year, Obama has survived largely by uttering the most banal, the least offensive pablum that, falling on the ears of the young and less sophisticated voters, has proved to be as soothing a balm as has ever been applied to the American electorate. But in that one moment, after many months of obfuscation, obtuseness, and just plain lying about his positions on the issues, Obama let slip the concept of redistributing the wealth. Every taxpayer regardless of their education or sophistication knows full well what “redistribution” means to them - higher taxes. Obama can swear on a stack of Korans between now and election day that he will only tax the rich. But that single phrase - “spread the wealth” - has damaged if not destroyed his credibility on taxes.

So in essence, this entire smear campaign by the Obamabots on the left is really for naught. They might kill Joe the Plumber’s iconic status. But they will never be able to whitewash what Obama said.

There are some who take this smearing of Joe to be an example of what America under Obama will be like - dissent stifled, opponents destroyed. I’ve got news for my friends on the right - we’d be doing the same thing in their shoes.

I don’t know what information the righty blogs and media would be digging up and plastering all over the net if McCain had responded to a question by Joe on the economy and made some stupid statement in response. All I am certain of is that we would be doing it. I know I would. I have no doubt I would be republishing all the stuff the rightysphere dug up on poor Joe and do it with a clear conscience. “He asked for it by getting himself involved…” would be my rationalization. And those honest enough to ask themselves whether they would participate in such a campaign - to switch places mentally with the left -should think long and hard before they answer in the negative.

I would hasten to add that such an attack by the right on Joe would no doubt have s lot less resonance than smears against Joe by the left now, given the mainstream media’s curious inability to get off their knees and take a respite from their Obama worship long enough to play this little media scenario exactly the same way they are playing it today. Joe would be trumpeted to the skies as an “Everyman,” anything negative in his past would be buried, while McCain’s dumb comment would be highlighted continuously.

If life were fair, this is the way it would be today only it would be Obama’s comment on “spreading the wealth” that would be shown over and over again on every cable TV news channel and become the subject of long, thoughtful pieces in the New York Times. But life isn’t fair and conservatives, more than anyone else, know this. It’s written on the first page of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Handbook: “Life in a world dominated by a liberal media, liberal intelligentsia, liberal culture, and a liberal educational system will never be fair for members of the VRWC. GET USED TO IT.”

Joe might not be “fair” game. But he is game nonetheless. It is a fact in this age of polarized and poisonous politics that it hardly matters who gets caught in the crossfire. What matters is that anyone who gets in the way or who inserts themselves into this great, gaping maw of political media that can build you up, lionize you, and destroy you in less time than it takes to digest your breakfast, is by definition, part of the story.

I’m sorry for Joe. I admire his ambition and the fact that he works hard all day and comes home at night, taking care of his 13 year old son on his own.I agree that he is an iconic figure. He wants a better life for his kid and himself. And he has the right idea of what government’s role in America should be.

And he doesn’t deserve the disapprobation and calumny being heaped upon him by the rabid dog left, the Obama campaign, and the media. But in this case, as well as other cases like Joe’s, “deserve” has got nothing to do with it.

Pardon the slow loading of the page. My little hosting company got overwhelmed by the Instalanche and Hot Air explosion.

Do you want to know why the race card — or at least the 21st century manifestation of it — is the most powerful, most effective political weapon in America?

There is no response possible. There is no answer to an African-American’s charge that what you are saying, or hinting, or thinking, or wishing, or unconsciously dreaming is racist.

Any attempt to defend yourself gives credence to the charge. Ignoring the smear is tantamount to an acknowledgement of guilt.

One may ask why all of a sudden Obama himself, his campaign, his surrogates, and his sycophants in the press are throwing the race card around with such abandon? Why the speeches, statements, editorials, op-eds, columns, and blog posts taking McCain to task for “allowing” or “enabling” or “causing” or “encouraging” racism to rear its ugly head at political rallies?

The answer is simple; use it or lose it when it comes to the race card. Short on specific charges of mass hate being whipped up at McCain political events while long on scurrilous, baseless, smears, Black legislators, columnists, and luminaries have taken up the tactics of the Night Rider in order to terrorize people into keeping their mouths shut while casting nauseating aspersions on the GOP candidate for president and his supporters.

Yeah, I know exactly what I’m saying. And the people I’m saying it to royally deserve it. I am fully aware of the history involved. I am using the term “Night Rider” deliberately and for full, unmitigated effect. For if we cannot call out these besmirches of the democratic process and put them in their place (another loaded phrase that I am fully cognizant of its history and meaning and am using deliberately), then they will have been allowed to get away with a smear so calumnious in its form and implication that the very nature of American elections will be altered and free speech as we know it and understand it will be gone.

I am not going to let that happen without a fight. And if I have to throw political correctness to the winds and compare the tactics of African Americans who play the race card with those of their mortal enemies, then so be it.

Congressman John Lewis - perhaps at the behest of Obama himself - donned the white robes and hood in order to let loose this, the most vicious and unprincipled attack on an American politician I have seen in quite a while:

“George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights,” said Lewis, who is black. “Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”

At bottom, it is not credible to believe that John Lewis thinks for one second that John McCain’s tactics ape those of George Wallace and could lead to the deaths of innocents. If he does, then he makes himself out to be an idiot. And John Lewis is no fool. He is not only a man who fought for civil rights (and has the physical scars to prove it) but he was a savvy enough pol to advance the cause in the face of the most stringent and violent opposition.

Since Lewis can no more believe that McCain is using the tactics of Wallace than I believe in a flat earth, that makes his “critique” of the McCain campaign a lie - a deliberate, careful, decision by Lewis to bear false witness. And he has done it knowing full well the effect it will have on decent people everywhere.

Even Obama found Lewis’s lies too much and distanced himself - slightly- from the implication that McCain was the reincarnation of Wallace. In effect, Obama embraced Lewis’s lie while separating himself from the Wallace implication. He did it by agreeing with Lewis’s critique but piously giving McCain the benefit of the doubt that he was not possessed by the spirit of George Wallace.

“Sen. Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies,” said the campaign statement.”

“John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night.”

Right? Wrong? Which is it Obama? It certainly appears that Obama wants the benefits accrued by Lewis smearing McCain and his supporters without the baggage associated with its more problematic implications.

Lewis himself backtracked slightly from his original statement but still lied through his teeth:

“My statement was a reminder to all Americans that toxic language can lead to destructive behavior,” he said. “I am glad that Sen. McCain has taken some steps to correct divisive speech at his rallies. I believe we need to return to civil discourse in this election about the pressing economic issues that are affecting our nation.”

I guess there’s “toxic language” and then there’s the race card. No double standard there, Congressman.

If it were only Lewis advancing this meme of McCain and his supporters being racist pigs, one might conclude that the Congressman was some kind of loose cannon, firing off on his own accord and not part of any concerted effort to outrageously brand the Democrat’s political opponents as Kluxers.

Ah, but the sheets that terrorize need not only be hiding white faces. Here’s Adam Sewrer writing in The American Prospect, equating calling Obama a “socialist” with racism:

The hysterical accusations of socialism from conservatives echo similar accusations leveled at black leaders in the past, as though the quest for racial parity were simply a left-wing plot. Obama may not actually be a socialist or communist, but his election would strike another powerful blow to the informal racial hierarchy that has existed in America since the 1960s, when it ceased being enforced by law. This hierarchy, which holds that whiteness is synonymous with American-ness, is one conservatives are now instinctively trying to preserve. Like black civil-rights activists of the 1960s, Obama symbolizes the destruction of a social order they see as fundamentally American, which is why terms like “socialism” are used to describe the threat.

This phenomenon extends beyond Obama’s candidacy. The conservative explanation for the mortgage crisis falls neatly into this narrative, too; the country is at risk because Democrats allowed minorities to disrupt the natural social order by becoming homeowners. Never mind that this defies all data, logic, and history, the narrative resonates because it allows Obama, a living symbol of black folks rising above “their station,” to become a focus for conservative economic anxieties.

At least this guy comes by his blithering ignorance honestly. Unlike Lewis whose calculated smear was meant to damage the McCain campaign with moderates and more conservative Democrats, Sewrer’s twisted, tortured analysis starts from the bogus premise that “hysterical” accusations of socialism against Obama are rooted in a historical narrative that has white people denigrating “the otherness” of Blacks who dare to seek power and influence and that when the crowds shout “socialist” they really mean “n***er!”

I have made it clear that I do not believe Obama is a socialist. Others, either because they don’t understand the term or because they see Obama’s far left redistributive ideas and efforts at reform as “creeping socialism” disagree with me.

Whatever epithets hurled at Malcolm X or Dr. King in the past — however people viewed their problematic associations with individuals who were committed to overthrowing the government of the United States — have nothing to do with Republicans today trying to keep America “white.” It is a baseless, thoughtless, ignorant charge made by someone so intellectually besotted with identity politics that history itself gets turned on its head in service to this false and capricious theme. Did Mr. Sewrer ever dream for one moment that people might actually be sincere in their belief that Obama’s stated policies (not to mention his past and present associations with true radicals and communists) are a indicative of a form of “stealth socialism?”

People of good faith - an animal rare indeed in this race - can argue the merits of such a position. But Sewrer isn’t interested in good faith, he is interested in advancing his racialist worldview where nothing else matters save a reading of history and our present politics through the broken kaleidoscope of his own black bigotry. It is probably emotionally satisfying but as a talisman of truth, it hardly stands up to rigorous scrutiny.

The thought that there are some people who might actually believe Obama is a socialist never crossed his mind because in his narrow, intellectual construct there is race, and then there is race, and if you run out of those, you always have race to fall back on. There is no history, only race. There is no American narrative that doesn’t place race front and center. This is where our obsession with identity politics has led us: A skewing of history and politics so profound that playing the race card becomes an easy shortcut to silencing one’s opponents no matter what argument they advance.

If you can’t beat ‘em, gag ‘em.

So when Mr. Sewrer plays the race card - as he does in his article - he does it with a clear conscience. Put simply, the fool doesn’t know any better. But there are fools, and then there are coldly calculating bigots who take more pleasure than people like Lewis in throwing race in our faces (Lewis, after all, was only playing dirty politics) while gleefully setting crosses afire all across the political landscape.

There is no other way to describe this Les Payne column in Newsday except political terrorism:

Palin’s bland ferocity lends itself easily to vitriol of the type that inflames half-wits. A bald-pated Florida sheriff, one Mike Scott, got carried away under the swoon last week in Estero, Fla., in introducing Palin. Stressing Obama’s middle name, Sheriff Scott paced the stage, in violation of police rules, while inciting the crowd in his full uniform adorned with colorful patches, stars and medals befitting a grand wizard of some mystic order of white knights.

At Clearwater, Gov. Palin lathered up the crowd herself. “You’re going to have to hang on to your hats,” Palin told the rally, according to The Washington Post, “because from now until Election Day it may get kind of rough.” Linking Sen. Obama to a reformed radical of the ’60s, Palin shrieked her signature smut line, “he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

“Kill him!” a man in the crowd reportedly responded to Palin’s rabble-rousing. Her related attacks on the media had already whipped a frenzy among the crowd of about 3,000. Tempers rose to a boil when she blamed Katie Couric’s questions for tripping her up as a seeming dimwit. The Post wrote, “Palin supporters turned on reporters … waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. … One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African-American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

I have written twice about the incredibly exaggerated reports of “rage” at McCain campaign events. Payne goes a step further by equating a sheriff uttering the sacrilege of Obama’s middle name with a Kluxer.

Who’s the ignoramus here? A sheriff (who was fully within his rights to be at a political rally dressed as he was despite what Payne infers) who dared mention The Messiah’s middle name while introducing Palin to the crowd? I’ve seen the video of this event and the use of “Hussein” got a roar from those assembled. But was it because he used the candidate’s middle name or was it because of the context he used it in?

After saying that “there were three kinds of people in the world; those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happen, Sheriff Scott threw the crowd a piece of raw meat when he said “On election day, let’s leave Barack Hussein Obama wondering what happened.”

Was the crowd roaring because of the use of “Hussein” or was it due to the punchline - a pretty damned effective one if you ask me.? Only your psychic knows for sure. If the crowd roared because of Scott’s allusion to victory on election day, it destroys Payne’s entire narrative of the event - including Scott as another Republican closet Kluxer. (What an extraordinary personal smear by Payne).

No matter. Never stop a bigot when they’re on a roll. Scott’s use of “Hussein” was out of line because John McCain believes that saying Obama’s real name is wrong. I agree.

But the implication is that he is Muslim not that he is black so how Payne and his racialist cohorts can twist what is clearly a tweak at Obama’s father and the idea that Obama is a closet Muslim is a mystery. Except that when you are playing the race card, even giving a weather report can be construed as racist.

I think it a smear to use Obama’s middle name and I wish Scott and other McCain supporters would realize it and stop it. It is questionable hardball politics not racial bigotry. And Payne mindlessly repeats the false notion that the crowd at the event and other McCain/Palin rallies was “angry” or hateful. Payne was obviously too lazy to watch the videos himself. They were happy. They were excited. And for people like Payne to take out of context the mouthings of one or two idiots at a rally attended by thousands is absolute lunacy.

I see absolutely no difference at Obama rallies when he or Biden tosses the rhetorical red meat out into the crowd. The roar becomes deafening. People are laughing and whooping it up. When Bush or McCain is mentioned, they are booed. This is politics. And anyone who would deliberately construe malice or unreasonable emotions by referring to Bush/Palin gatherings as “angry mobs” or intimate anything unusual at all is a liar - or a simple minded fool.

These hooded riders of the night might obscure their false, misleading, and vile calumnious rhetoric with pious words designed to horrify decent Americans and equate voting for John McCain with voting for a racist. But they are trying to terrorize voters into supporting Obama by smearing his opponent with the most nauseating, the stickiest label one can slap on to a candidate in American politics.

Take off your hoods and look in the mirror, those of you - all of you - who are shamelessly and so easily playing the race card. It is all of you who are playing with fire, not McCain. By your words, you are stifling free expression by trying to intimidate people you disagree with through a false and wholly misleading narrative.

And I submit that this is infinitely more dangerous than your fantasies and lies about McCain whipping up a racist mob.